In general, information technology (IT) is used in offices to facilitate smooth operation of a primary task processor. IT has evolved into an infrastructure that unifies several distributed structures into one.
In recent years, a great deal of effort has gone towards building an IT infrastructure for an enterprise's overseas branches. Such an IT infrastructure is to support an integrated solution for performing related processes, such as production, sales, marketing, export, and accounting. And, there is a need for organic integration and fault management.
However, an IT infrastructure is conventionally managed by individual managers through a solution for each management point (e.g., production facility management, system management (SMS), DB management, network management, application management). Also, task processes are organically connected. Accordingly, while faults may be recognized by individual management solutions, it is difficult to recognize causes of a complex fault (occurring in several points).
Further, modules must be modified each time an introduced integrated management solution and an associated solution have a different management information format or a management policy is changed.
In a conventional technique, in order to associate a variety of management information of existing point-specific management solutions with one another through an integrated management solution, such as MAXIGENT, a program for converting management information from point-specific management solutions is used. Management information converted using data obtained by parsing a solution log is collected by the integrated management solution without being processed.
This conventional technique has the following problems.
First, since there is no user interface (UI) capable of monitoring all management-information-data converting modules of the point-specific management solutions, it is impossible to check which management information of the solution is collected and whether data is sent normally.
Second, when a data conversion technique is modified due to change in an integrated management policy, management-information converting modules of point-specific management solutions must be all modified.
Third, while specific management solutions report faults at each point, it is difficult to discover interrelations between faults. Accordingly, it is very difficult to recognize causes of faults, which degrades production and service.